Developer Exchange: My experience at Talabat in Kuwait

by Kristaps Zeibarts | Berlin

06 December 2018

Hey, my name is Kristaps Zeibarts and I am a Lead iOS Engineer at Delivery Hero Germany where my team and I are responsible for the iOS applications of the German food ordering brands – pizza.de and Lieferheld. I would like to tell you about my recent visit to Kuwait, where I met the lovely Talabat team, one of our brands in the Delivery Hero family.

In the Summer of 2018 Mohamed Moussa, who is a QA Manager at Talabat, visited our Berlin office through the Developer Exchange Program within Delivery Hero. After his successful exchange, it was my turn to pay them a visit. The goal of the visit was to share our knowledge and experience in building test automation, continuous integration and delivery for mobile apps.

Having never been to Kuwait, I was excited to go. I was warmly welcomed and taken care of at all times. It was amazing, I didn’t have to move a finger.

One thing that surprised me though was that food ordering is way more popular than here in Germany. When I visited it was over 45 degrees celsius outside. No wonder that at this temperature people are too comfortable to leave their climatized homes and offices to buy groceries and cook. For them the easiest way is to just order food, and they do it multiple times a day. The food there is amazing by the way.

At Delivery Hero Germany the iOS team works with two brands – Lieferheld and pizza.de, but Talabat has built one app that currently operates in 6 countries. So it is far more challenging to test the functionality, because every country has its own tiny specifics. Fortunately the QA team is doing a great job and they have written very extensive cross platform user interface test suite for Android and Web using Appium.

I just happened to be there on a day when they were preparing releases of mobile apps. The whole process was smooth and everyone from the team acted in an orchestrated manner. In the QA area they had a Jenkins server. It was attached to Android devices where UI tests were triggered and running in parallel on phones in different sizes and shapes. At the same time testers also did a manual review of the new features to make sure that nothing was missed and the releases could be published without any delays.

So far everything sounds great. The next steps are to integrate iOS in their automated test environment, including complete continuous delivery, which will allow them to automate repetitive but necessary tasks and do it as often as needed.

To summarize, I just want to emphasize that this is a great time to work at Delivery Hero, as we operate in more than 40 markets. The knowledge exchange program gives fellow developers a chance to see how others work across the globe. Essentially the cultures are different but the development processes are very similar.